We bid farewell to a thinker little known for his best thinking

We bid farewell to a thinker little known for his best thinking

William F. Buckley the Georgist

Once on Firing Line, Buckley endorsed taxing land value — but in Central America.

by Fred E. Foldvary, Senior Editor

William F. Buckley was a leading American conservative intellectual for half a decade. He died on Feb. 27, 2008 at the age of 82. Buckley founded the National Review magazine, wrote many books and numerous essays, and hosted the television show Firing Line. Bill Buckley helped bring conservativism into the American mainstream, where it triumphed with the nomination of Barry Goldwater and the election of Ronald Reagan as U.S. president. He helped found the New York State Conservative Party, and in his spare time, Buckley wrote spy novels.

In contrast to many of todays vulgar conservative commentators, Buckley dealt cheerfully yet seriously with ideas and spoke eloquently in debates, using a vocabulary larger than the circumference of the earth.

Few of the news articles on William F. Buckleys life and death mentioned that he was a Georgist, an adherent of the policies espoused by the American economist and social reformer, Henry George. Buckleys intellectual development was influenced strongly by the Georgist libertarians Albert Nock and Frank Chodorov. Buckley’s father, William Buckley, Sr., brought scholars to his Connecticut home to privately tutor his children. One of these tutors was Frank Chodorov, who became Buckley’s mentor. The father was also a friend of Albert Jay Nock, and encouraged his son to read Nock’s works.

Nock and Chodorov were free-marketeers, geolibertarians who recognized and wrote that a truly free market requires public revenue from land rent. Taxes on labor, enterprise, and goods interfere with and hamper the market, whereas tapping land value for public revenue does not burden enterprise and even helps the economy.

Nock and Chodorov were conservative in defending the voluntary market economy from the massive interference of the coercive nanny state, but in seeking to shift taxation from labor to land, they were radicals. Land-value taxation is conservative, liberal, and radical simultaneously.

In a C-span interview with Brian Lamb in 2000, Buckley quoted Henry George, The land belongs to those in usufruct. However, Buckley did not actively promote land-value taxation. His right-wing associates opposed taxing land, probably because they recognized that the tapping of land value for public revenue will bring the price of land down to ground-zero, and rich conservatives tend to be big landowners, or they get funded by landed interests.

There are many conservative or free-market thinkers who understand the Georgist rationales for tapping value rather than punishing labor and enterprise and consumption, but are silent. Milton Friedman, for example, understood that the tax on land value was the least worst, as he put it, but did not speak or write about it. He thought that there was not enough land value to tap.

So ultimately, Georgism was in Buckleys mind but not in his soul. He did not have the Georgist fire that motivates its advocates. The fire in Buckley was anti-communism and an opposition to economic statism. He did not grasp that geolibertarianism was the path that would give the worker his maximum wage and thus wipe out the workers need to beg favors from the state.

By not promoting what he knew to be the best policy for public finance, Buckleys conservativism became somewhat hollow. If one does not advocate taxing land, one implicitly if not explicitly advocates taxing other things, such as income or goods, and thereby one promotes the statist interference in and destruction of trade and investment. So even though Buckleys conservativism triumphed in politics, it was an empty victory. Conservativism today touts a flat-rate income tax and a national sales tax rather than being grounded in tapping land rent.

Modern statist liberals too have this blind spot, seeking to tax the rich, not differentiating richness from pumped-up land values from the wealth generated by society-enriching entrepreneurship. Liberals and conservatives both attack the entrepreneur, the worker, and the consumer with their tax the rich and tax the consumer assaults on the free market.

Had Buckley continued and promoted the legacy of Albert Jay Nock and Frank Chodorov, he would have been one of historys truly great men. Instead, he is a big man in intellectual thought, just like he was a big man on the Yale campus, but falls short of joining the club of truly great thinkers who shook the world, men like John Locke, Adam Smith, and Henry George.

We are Hanno Beck, Lindy Davies, Fred Foldvary, Mike O'Mara, Jeff Smith, and assorted volunteers, all dedicated to bringing you the news and views that make a difference in our species struggle to win justice, prosperity, and eco-librium.

5 Responses to We bid farewell to a thinker little known for his best thinking

Good Job, Fred. Although WFB had much influence on my perspectives in the 60s, there has always been a compulsion to continually search for greater understanding. I googled Albert Nock and Frank Chodorov and found many great links – one by Chodorov from nearly 60 years ago is very insightful entitled “Joseph, Secretary of Agriculture” and ends with these words, “And the American civilization went the way of the Egyptian.” see htap://www.lewrockwell.com/chodorov/chodorov3.html

Bill Buckley did refer to Henry Georges ideas in a column a couple of years ago entitled “Home, Dear Home,” available at htap://www.wealthandwant.com/docs/Buckley_HDH.htm

The final four paragraphs said:
Henry George, the eminent social philosopher of a century ago, turned the attention of planners and economists, however briefly, to the indefeasible factor of land scarcity. Capital and labor can increase; land cannot.

Accordingly, George was the apostle of the single tax. It aimed most directly at land speculators. His insights would focus now on the limitations on the use of land imposed by zoning. If John Jones wants an acre protecting his house, he is laying claim to something that cannot expand in size. Since land, in Georges analysis, is forever limited, it must be thought of and treated as common property. And therefore the rental value of one acre should constitute a tax (the single tax) on the person who sequesters it for himself.

A strong case can be made for the amenities of zoning laws. But they have an effect on the availability of housing, and on its cost. One result is that housing costs are increasing faster than inflation.

But is the Henry George factor likely to be espoused in political platforms? It cannot happen soon because too many interests are vested in zoning laws. But sharp political eyes should be trained on the question, in search of a viable formulation designed to fight against homelessness for grandchildren who cannot be expected to pay the projected cost of housing.

“So ultimately, Georgism was in Buckley’s mind but not in his soul. He did not have the Georgist fire that motivates its advocates. The fire in Buckley was anti-communism and an opposition to economic statism. He did not grasp that geolibertarianism was the path that would give the worker his maximum wage and thus wipe out the worker’s need to beg favors from the state. ” –

–Ulimately Buckly was being obedient to the official position of the Catholic Church and the landed oligarchy, that supports it, who do not like Henry Georges land value tax.

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Arts & Letters

Geonomics is …

the annoying habit of seeing the hand of land in almost all transactions. In geonomics we maintain the distinction between the items bearing exchange value that come into being via human effort — wealth — and those that don’t — land. Keeping this distinction in the forefront makes it obvious that speculating in land drives sprawl, that hoarding land retards Third World development, that borrowing to buy land plus buildings engorges banks, that much so-called “interest” is quasi-rent, that the cost of land inflates faster than the price of produced goods and services, that over half of corporate profit is from real estate (Urban Land Institute, 1999). Summing up these analyses, geonomists offer a Grand Unifying Theory, that the flow of rent pulls all other indicators in its wake. Geonomics differs from economics as chemistry from alchemy, as astronomy from astrology.

the study of the money we spend on the nature we use. When we pay that money to private owners, we reward both speculation and over-extraction. Robert Kiyosaki’s bestseller, Rich Dad’s Prophecy, says, “One of the reasons McDonald’s is such a rich company is not because it sells a lot of burgers but because it owns the land at some of the best intersections in the world. The main reason Kim and I invest in such properties is to own the land at the corner of the intersection. (p 200) My real estate advisor states that the rich either made their money in real estate or hold their money in real estate.” (p 141, via Greg Young) When government recovers the rents for natural advantages for everyone, it can save citizens millions. Ben Sevack, Montreal steel manufacturer, tells us (August 12) that Alberta, by leasing oil & gas fields, recovers enough revenue to be the only province in Canada to get by without a sales tax and to levy a flat provincial income tax. While running for re-election, provincial Premier Ralph Klein proposes to abolish their income tax and promises to eliminate medical insurance premiums and use resource revenue to pay for all medical expense for seniors. After all this planned tax-cutting and greater expense, they still expect a large budget surplus. Even places without oil and gas have high site values in their downtowns, and high values in their utility franchises. Recover the values of locations and privileges, displace the harmful taxes on sales, salaries, and structures, then use the revenue to fund basic government and pay residents a dividend, and you have geonomics in action.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old log-gers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

a way to connect the dots. Making the cyber rounds is “The Cavernous Divide” by Scott Klinger, from AlterNet (posted March 21): “As the number of billionaires in the world expands, so does the number of those in poverty.” Duh. The yawning income gap is not news. Nearly every issue of our quarterly digest carries a similar quote. Yet the connection was worked out long ago by one of America’s greatest thinkers, Henry George, who labeled his masterpiece, Progress and Poverty. Techno- and socio-advances always enrich few and impoverish many. Yet progress also pushes up location values – the geonomic insight (is Silicon Valley cheaper now or more expensive?). Instead of taxing income, sales, or buildings, society could collect those values of sites, resources, EM spectrum, and ecosystem services via fees and dues, which would lower the income ceiling, and instead of lavishing corporate welfare, pay out the recovered revenue via dividends, which would jack up the income floor. Dots connected.

a way to have everybody pulling on the same end of the rope. Last summer’s expansive forest fires shed light on growing class resentment in the West. Old loggers and ranchers rankled at the new urgency to stamp out the blazes that threatened the recent Aspenesque settlers. The newcomers expected working class firemen to make protecting their expensive homes top priority. (Chr Sci Mntr, Spt 7) The tinder for this envy? Rich people moving in bid up the price of land, making it hard to afford by people on the margin. The fault really lies with our system of privatizing land value. If this rising value were collected by land dues and shared by rent dividends – the essence of geonomic policy – who’d complain? The more people move in, the higher the land value, and the fatter the dividend paid to residents. Then people on the margin might go out of their way to invite rich outsiders in.

a study of a phenomenon David Ricardo noted going on two centuries ago. When wine grapes rise to $10,000 a ton from the very best land (last year, cabernet sauvignon commanded an average of $4,021 a ton in the Napa Valley), then vineyard prices soar from $18,000 an acre in the 1980′s to $100,000 an acre five years ago and now for a top pedigree up to $300,000 an acre (The New York Times, April 9, via Wyn Achenbaum). Pricey land does not make wine pricey; spendy wine makes land spendy. While vintners make their wine tasty, nature and society in general – not any lone owner – make land desireable. Steve Kerch of CBS’s MarketWatch (April 5) notes that much of what a home sells for on the open market is a reflection of intangible factors such as what school district the house sits in. The price the builder has to pay for the land also tends to be driven by the same intangibles. Because the value of land comes from society, and because one’s use excludes the rest of society, each user owes all others compensation, and is owed compensation by everyone else. Sharing land’s value, instead of taxing one’s efforts, is the policy of geonomics.

of interest to Dave Lakhani, President Bold Approach (Mar 8) and Matt Ozga (Jan 29): “I write for the Washington Square News, the student run newspaper out of New York University. Geonomics seems like it has great significance, especially in this area. When was geonomics developed, and by whom?”
About 1982 I began. Two years later, Chilean Dr Manfred Max-Neef offered the term geonomics for Earth-friendly economics. In the mid-80s, a millionaire founded a Geonomics Institute on Middlebury College campus in Vermont re global trade. In the 1990s, CNBC cablecast a show, Geonomics, on world trade as it benefits world traders. My version of geonomics draws heavily from the American Henry George who wrote Progress & Poverty (1879) and won the mayoralty of New York but was denied his victory by Tammany Hall (1886). He in turn got lots from Brits David Ricardo, Adam Smith, and the French physiocrats of the 1700s. My version differs by focusing not on taxation but on the flow of rents for sites, resources, sinks, and government-granted privileges. Forgoing these trillions, we instead tax and subsidize, making waste cheap and sustainability expensive. To quit distorting price, replace taxes with “land dues” and replace subsidies with a Citizens Dividend.
Matt: “This idea of sharing rents sounds, if not explicitly socialist, at least at odds with some capitalist values (only the strong survive & prosper, etc). Is it fair to say that geonomics has some basis in socialist theory?”
A closer descriptor would be Christian. Beyond ethics into praxis, Alaska shares oil rent with residents, and they’re more libertarian than socialist. While individuals provide labor and capital, no one provides land while society generates its value. Rent is not private property but public property. Sharing Rent is predistribution, sharing it before an elite or state has a chance to get and misspend it, like a public REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) paying dividends to its stakeholders – a perfectly capitalist model. What we should leave untaxed are our sales, salaries, and structures, things we do produce.

one of many words I coined over 20 years ago: geoism, geonomics, geonomy, geocracy, etc – neologisms that later others came up with, too. CNBC once had a Geonomics Show, and Middlebury College has a Geonomics Institute. If “economy” is literally “management of the household”, then geonomy is “management of the planet”. The kind of management I had in mind is not what CNBC was thinking – top-down. My geonomics is not hands-on, interfering, but hands-off, organic. It’d strive to align policy with natural processes, similar to what holistic healing does in medicine, what organic farming does in agriculture. Geonomics attends to two key components: One, the crucial stuff to track is fat — or profit, especially profits without production, such as rent, or all the money we spend on the nature we use. Society’s surplus is the sine qua non for growth, needed to counter death – not merely more, but sustainable development, more from less. Two, the basic process to respect is the feedback loop. These let nature maintain balance automatically and could do the same for markets, if we let them. Letting them would turn our economies, now our masters, into a geonomy, our servant, providing us with prosperity, eco-librium (to coin a term) and leisure, time off — a hostile environment for economan but a cradle for a loving and creative humanity.

the policy that the earth’s natural patterns suggests. Use the eco-system’s self-regulating feedback loops as a model. What then needs changing? Basically, the flow of money spent to own or use Earth (both sites and resources) must visit each of us. Our agent, government, exists to collect this natural rent via fees and to disburse the collected revenue via dividends. Doing this, we could forgo taxes on homes and earnings and subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. For more, see our web site, our pamphlet of the title above, or any of our other lit pieces; ask for our literature list.

an economic policy based on the earth’s natural patterns. Eco-systems self-regulate by using feedback loops to keep balance. Can economies do likewise? Why don’t they now produce efficiently and distribute fairly? The answers lie in the money we spend on the earth we use. To attain people/planet harmony, that financial flow from sites and resources must visit each of us. Our agent, government, must collect this natural rent via fees and disburse the collected revenue via dividends. And, it must forgo taxes on homes and earnings, and quit subsidies of either the needy or the greedy. As our steward, government must also collect Ecology Security Deposits, require Restoration Insurance, and auction off the occasional Emissions Permit. And that’s about it – were nature our model.